UICHR Announces OCOB Selection for 2017

Main Content

The UICHR is pleased to announce that its 2017 selection for its One Community, One Book program is The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam by G. Willow Wilson.

Journalist G. Willow Wilson, a white woman born in Colorado, relates the remarkable story of her conversion to Islam and her marriage to an Egyptian man in a volatile post-9/11 world. Settling in Cairo, their relationship challenges their assumptions about family, belief, and tradition. Navigating between the secular West and the Muslim East, Wilson attempts to forge a "third culture" that might accommodate her values without compromising them or her friends and family on both sides of the divide.

Wilson will visit the UI campus to deliver the OCOB 2017 keynote lecture. Join us on October 8th, 2017, at 2pm on the Hadley Stage at Hancher to hear Wilson's lecture, "A Superhero for Generation Why." This is a free event.

OCOB 2017 is part of the Hancher initiative, Embracing Complexity, and Wilson's lecture will be the first event of the 2017 Iowa City Book Festival, a program of the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature Organization.

The UICHR thanks our 2017 OCOB program co-sponsors: Hancher and The Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. We also thank our community partners: The Coralville Public Library, IDEAL, and Hills Bank.